20 years ago, Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich combined to, as they loved to say it: “end welfare as we know it.” One thing neither of them ever talk about is the beneath-the-underclass they created: people with few welfare benefits and almost no cash…people Living on $2 a Day. Kathryn Edin of Johns Hopkins University literally wrote the book, reporting from the ground up on the real lives of people without money. And by they way, almost everyone of them would gladly work if they could find a job that made sense.

It’s Labor Day, the perfect time to think again about one of America’s worst, persistent labor abuses…the abuse of the Federal statute known as H1B, by some of America’s biggest and richest corporations, who take jobs way from American workers and hand them to cheaper foreign temps, and often threaten to cut the severance pay of workers who refuse to train their replacements. Where, you ask are the Dept of Labor, the Justice Dept fighting to protect American workers and the law? The same place as the Obama White House, standing by. Patrick Thibodeau of Computer World broke this story and has stayed on it.

High school is for young adults…people transitioning out of the protected life of pre-adolescence into the so-called real world, a place of adult-like issues of personal rivalry, and sexual identity. These complexities define the content of the book market called “young adult.” John Feinstein is among its most successful writers, specializing in books about high school sports, a genre that has changed as dramatically as the lives of today’s mid-teenagers. John talks about his books and the American literary tradition they are part of.

Amos Kamil always knew there were dark shadows at his famous New York City prep school Horace Mann, but it wasn’t until decades after his graduation that he learned the school was rife with sexual exploitation of students by members of the faculty and staff. His investigative reporting called out school administrators whose response was, well, awful, refusing to admit guilt and brutalizing victims who sued for compensation. Truth may win out, but justice for sexually abused former Horace Mann students seems far away.

“Funny business” is a phrase meant to be ironic. “Funny business” is not funny…or not funny ha-ha, and funny business hardly runs like a legitimate enterprise. And neither does the business of comedy. In his book, The Comedians, Kliph Nesteroff presents a history of comedy in America told through its often funny comics and the often unfunny people who hire them. There are laughs and characters aplenty, but there are serious questions, too…like when and how to be funny in the days after 9/11.

When Gerald Moore’s family moved from their ranch to Tucumcari, he thought they’d arrived in a big town. And when he moved to Albuquerque and a job reporting for the Tribune all the opportunities seemed even bigger. Next to come for Gerald: New York City and LIFE Magazine…a reporter’s life, covering urban riots and the dawn of LSD, among other stories…and big questions like…which picture best summed up the Pope’s visit to America…the one at St Patrick’s Cathedral or the one at Yankee Stadium?

Today on HERE & THERE: we begin a review of some our favorite conversations about books with their authors. Ann Jones’ THEY WERE SOLDIERS is an enduring classic of war reporting. Ann focuses on a crucial question the news media are likely to overlook: what happens to wounded American soldiers after they come home from war? The answer will leave you very uncomfortable. Among the many things left out of President George W Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s plans for war in Iraq and Afghanistan was caring for American casualties.

The Donald Trump Presidential campaign seems stuck in a downward direction. Can the new third campaign management team turn things around? Their plan C, is to return to Trump’s Plan A….let Donald be Donald. But isn’t that what started his crash in the first place? Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter David Cay Johnston’s new book explains just who Trump is, when he’s being himself…and what it might mean for America if a guy whose watchword in business is “revenge,” loses the Presidential election.

Dr. Bill Thomas was just starting out as a doctor when he found himself caring for dozens of elderly people in a nursing home. It was a sad and depressing place, but Dr Thomas figured out how to transform it into an Eden…and from that sprung a global movement to use plants and animals not as decorations by as life-extenders. From there, Bill’s path has led him to tiny homes for self-sufficient elders and improved designs for emergency rooms for better treatment of old patients.

By almost every social and economic measurement, Native Americans are this country’s poorest people, especially if they live on Indian reservations. Wall Street Journal contributor Naomi Schaefer Riley says, in her new book, The New Trail of Tears: How Washington is Destroying American Indians, that much of the blame for these facts goes to the US Government and its paternalistic laws and policies that make Indian self-help in economic development almost impossible. Riley also indicts education on the reservation, which, she says, makes Indians who leave the rez way behind in the competition for good jobs.